Subject: [Tools-discuss] XMPP room improvements

From: Sebastian Kippe <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2020 12:54:08 +0100

Hi all,

A couple of people and I have made some suggestions for improving the
XMPP experience, both with normal clients as well as the new Web client
trial, in [email-masked]. Someone then directed me to this list
for submitting them to the right people. So here goes:

1. Turn on MAM (Message Archive Management) for persistent rooms

Missing room history from when you're offline, or because you hadn't
joined yet, is one of the biggest deficiencies of IRC. Luckily, there's
XEP 313, which is supported by all popular XMPP servers and most popular
clients: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html

Whoever has the permission to configure rooms should be able to simply
turn this on in the room settings from their client.

2. Configure human-readable room names, and add room descriptions

There are configuration properties for both a human-readable room name,
as well as room descriptions. A very simple change, but drastically
improves the experience, especially for users trying to find the right
rooms. This can also be configured from a client, when you have the
right permissions.

3. Configure room avatars

Human brains prefer images to pretty much all other information for
sub-second parsing. Aside from making everything look much nicer in
general, setting room avatars make it easier to discern between rooms in
one's client, when joined to many different rooms on many servers.
Unlike the other 2 suggestions, this one requires a small amount of
work, of course, in that someone has to create square room avatar images
before configuring/uploading them from a client.

Cheers,
Basti

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From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2020 21:05:24 -0500

> before configuring/uploading them from a client.

So, since most rooms are associated with WGs, it seems that really, each WG
needs to come up with a reasonable WG avatar.  Some have them (6tisch comes
to mind).  Most don't, but might want to think about it, because it also
helps with slides, etc.

What kind of resolution can/should this square room avatar be?

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>   . o O ( IPv6 IøT consulting )
           Sandelman Software Works Inc, Ottawa and Worldwide

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From: Tom Pusateri <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2020 10:42:25 -0500

> On Nov 14, 2020, at 9:05 PM, Michael Richardson <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 
> helps with slides, etc

When I was coming up with ways to distinguish working groups visually in the iPhone/iPad app, I ended up using a color by Area. Many people work inter-area but having an anchor like the area color helps quickly distinguish groups.

I suggest just creating the WG abbreviation inside a colored square that is the same background color for all working groups in an area.

I don’t mind doing this for each working group if that becomes the consensus moving forward.

Tom